Cohesity DataProtect Reviews

We are using it to back up virtual machines, VMware level, SQL server, Oracle Domain Controllers, Linux.

We're currently using hundred percent of it to back up 80% of our data.

It has absolutely improved our ROI. We moved from Microsoft DPM to Cohesity. Now, our incident tickets for backup have dropped by around a thousand per month.

DPM is a load of crap. It's horrible, absolutely horrible.

Its most valuable feature is its ransomware protection, so it has immutable backups.

In terms of what could be improved, it just needs some maturity. But, it gets better with every release.

I have been using Cohesity DataProtect for about a year.

We are using version 6.5.1E. We're about to go to 6.6.

It is on-prem today and it'll go to Azure public cloud soon.

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The stability is good.

The scalability is very good.

We probably have about 20 people using it and we have backup administrators and database administrators.

Main deployment and maintenance requires three people.

Their technical support team program is good.

We previously used Microsoft DPM and it is a horrendous solution. It's horrible. From from one to 10, I would give it a minus 10. It is that bad.

The initial setup was straightforward. Initial deployment took two months.

Our deployment strategy was to do it quickly as we can.

We did an initial POC, then a full POC, and then migrated everything as quick as we could.

We used TGS and they were good.

We saw ROI was after about nine months.

I believe we pay yearly. Additionally, there is the cost of the hardware. 

I also evaluated Rubrik and Commvault. The main difference between Cohesity, Rubrik and Commvault is price. It came down to price. Cohesity is more affordable.

My advice to anyone using Cohesity is to use vSphere tags.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Cohesity DataProtect an eight and it's still maturing.

It will get better.

We needed a more powerful solution for ransomware and anomaly detection. We enforced it with strong technology, and our needs are based on such functionality.

It works well with backup virtual machines and SQL services we have been using.

We have two big clusters for 16 nodes for each one, and we are trying to develop the IPAM technology for a new cluster on a vault site where we can store a third copy of our data.

The software can improve upon reports because, nowadays, reports are easy to understand. We have a set of reports on Cohesity, but we wish to use them on-premises. We want a feature with a set of reports embedded with the software.

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We have been using the solution since 2020, it has been three years now.

It is a stable solution. However, we had some hardware trouble because when nodes get broken, or the disc is not good, it becomes a problem for us.

It is a scalable solution. 

There are 10-15 users in the web user console, and the workload is about 1,000 databases and 1,000 digital machines. We use a yearly subscription model.

The workload is covered optimally. I don’t think we are going to increase the usage.

The tech support team is good. We only have international support, so the timetable is not easy for us, and we have to wait for the response from the support team.

The initial setup is not complex. It takes several months to install from zero because we have to define the logistical points to find space through all the network interfaces and technologies available, and it took us around four to five months.

Our deployment method was on-premises.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for backup.

The tool is faster and easier to use than others. The most critical feature for our data protection needs is the accuracy of backups and restores.

Cohesity DataProtect needs to improve its reporting capabilities. 

I have been using the product for two years. 

The solution has been stable, and we haven't had any significant challenges with stability.

The scalability works well for all our systems—we have various servers with two to three petabytes of data. Data recovery is pretty fast. We can bring up VMs instantly and haven't had any issues.

We earlier used Commvault and switched to Cohesity DataProtect since it was easier to use. 

While I didn't take part in the initial setup, I understand that the setup is relatively easy. Maintenance is also pretty easy.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. 

We use the product as a primary backup. 

Cohesity DataProtect is easy to deploy and operate. 

You need to put the full name instead of a few letters while searching for backup. It should also improve customization. 

I have been using the product for more than a year. 

Cohesity DataProtect is very stable. 

The product is scalable. My company has eight users. 

The tool's deployment is easy. The deployment takes around 30 minutes to complete. 

Cohesity DataProtect supported us during the deployment. 

The tool's licensing costs are yearly. It is cheaper than other backup solutions. 

I rate Cohesity DataProtect an eight out of ten. 

We primarily use this product for backups, reporting, and auditing.  As we are a publicly listed company, we rely heavily on the reporting that comes out of Cohesity to ensure that we are compliant across all aspects.

The backup and restore solution is a big step forward from our last solution and packs more than just backup in a box, allowing for additional features such as Disaster Recovery and utilising the space available in the cluster for storing files.

The auditing and reporting features are as important as the backups themselves.

We moved over from another backup solution that wasn't as innovative, which made it an easy solution to move away from. Cohesity uses up less rack space in the datacentre and allows for more than just backups, paving the way for more hyper-converged solutions, not just physically.

The initial contract with Cohesity is an improvement in terms of pricing above our previous solution but it remains to be seen what will happen after the contract comes to an end. The fundamental tasks of backups are restores are ahead of its game, relative to our previous solution.

The backup and restore feature is the most valuable.

Instant recovery options are a big benefit for urgent restores, as we don't need to wait for hours or days for a restore to complete before being able to access the files.

The restore to the appliance itself allows for faster (instant) access that saves us from waiting for the restores to happen to the datastores/volume/containers, which can take upwards of weeks in our case if we were to restore the larger VM guests.

We have seen many iterations of this such as restoring to the cloud but the outcome has always been a hit-and-miss solution.

The canned reporting could be improved. Many of the reports are basic, at most, and at times we had to open a support ticket to help find or develop a report for our needs. This is something that even our last solution had in place already.

Error reporting could also be improved. Rather than 'errorcode -2', it needs to be more descriptive or at least, provide KB articles related to the error or problem. This would save time in creating a ticket and try to describe to the support engineer what happened to cause an 'errorcode -2' that most of the time, we don't know either.

We have been using Cohesity DataProtect for seven months.

Stability-wise, so far so good.

The initial implementation requires a lot of babysitting and reporting on issues is a bit lacking. Hopefully, you've purchased a good support contract to help with those teething issues.

The solution is very scalable. It doesn't require a replacement appliance to expand for more capacity. Simply purchase another block/node and it's done.

My experience with support is mixed. There are times where the response and resolution are quick but at times, there are large gaps in the response. I'm not sure whether this is timezone-related. 

We switched over, as the previous solution was very lacking behind in innovation. It was missing basic features such as finding VMs and we were told to simply use "ctrl+f" to find them. However, this didn't help if the screen spanned across multiple pages.

The initial setup was straightforward, as we engaged with the company to help with the deployment. As long as the provided templates are completed and networking is done properly, it should be a smooth ride.

Our deployment was completed by a mix of both. The vendor team was very qualified and personnel was made available at each region to assist the local teams with implementation.

This is difficult to measure and quantify but the time saved across the regions baby-sitting the previous solution would be about eight hours per week.

My advice is to always negotiate for better pricing.

A contract with any backup vendor will always be a long-term deal, so think ahead and force them to sharpen their pencils. Never sign up without evaluating the price of other vendors over a three to a five-year term.

We evaluated Rubrik, Veeam, Nutanix Mine, Barracuda Backup, and Commvault.

Although the NPS score was rated highly, this should not be the only factor to consider.  There may be other factors involved that affect this score and as mentioned, backup solutions are a long-term deal. Not many companies will be willing to jump ship, risking their backups that are kept on proprietary platforms.

We use this product for the enterprise data life cycle and data retention.

With the ability to stage an entire lifecycle through versioning, integrated with AWS, it has made it possible to protect our corporation from end to end.

Integration with AWS has been invaluable to us. To have one platform that can leverage a cloud platform, as well as on-premises, has given us a full solution.

Technical support being outsourced is a downside but not different from every one of Cohesity's competitors. I was an early adopter when technical support was with actual developers and engineers, and not technical support staff. So, you can understand my point of view.   

Features I would like to see include a more visible data lifecycle monitoring tab, and an easier to read backup status dashboard. For example, I would lie to be able to see the status of all VMs for all jobs without drilling into each one.

Chat customer/technical support would also be great.

We have been using Cohesity DataProtect for three years.

I've used many different solutions including Veeam and Rubrik.

We switched because the return on investment was much greater with Cohesity.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to have a high-level understanding from your engineers before committing to a package. Cloud integration is a must. Do not pass up the licenses even if you are not currently using them.

Veeam and Rubrik were both evaluated and turned down.

We did not choose Veeam because the technical complexity was just not there to give us a full solution. Rubrik was passed over, due to the price. 

In my opinion, Cohesity is the way to go, with no doubt.

We use it for both local VM recovery, exchange, SQL recovery, and disaster recovery.

We have an on-premise exchange environment and it is really large and sensitive to backup impact, where it'll actually slow down the mailbox servers due to the stunning effect of trying to snapshot the VM. We previously had to do dedicated backup servers, which was an  additional consumption of on-premise resources of storage and compute. When we moved to Cohesity, we were able to target the passive copies of those databases so we no longer needed to have dedicated backup servers for the exchange environment, thereby reducing both the footprint of exchange and the resources consumed to support of the backup server.

I found value in the instant recovery with DataMove. I found value in the protection group model for applying policies to VMs. And in the overall UI navigation and the way that the application is laid out in the web browser.

In terms of what could be improved, their UI requires a manual refresh. It doesn't seem like it updates itself sometimes when you're moving from screens or waiting for a change to take effect, so you have to manually refresh. I would say that is an area for improvement, and I would also say that they have room for improvement for being able to roll back to previous versions after you've upgraded. They don't have a good rollback methodology to go back to previous versions if there is a problem with the new version.

I have been using Cohesity DataProtect for two months.

I feel like it's very stable.

We are running with a full no-redundancy, so we can lose an entire node in the clustering and it will operate without any downtime.

Cohesity DataProtect is very scalable. You can add resources just by adding additional nodes to the cluster and it seems to be able to scale out as large as you need it to.

It is used primarily by engineering and by a couple people in the app team on the SQL side. I'd say maybe half a dozen people total use it in our organization and they're in a combination of apps and engineering.

Deployment and maintenance are all done by me and my counterpart for the most part, just senior engineers on the engineering team. There are just two of us that are primarily handling that.

It is being used extensively in both of our data centers for all virtual workloads, as well as the SQL Server and exchange application level workloads. Those are our use cases primarily for those applications and the VM.

They have excellent technical support. I give them high marks for that. They all seem to know the product well and be willing to assist with things and have experiences all around with the support team.

We previously used Rubrik and we switched due to Rubrik tending to focus more on public cloud solutions over the past couple years and also the overall price of the solution - Rubrik was very expensive. We wanted to have more of a competitive product up against it.

Initial setup is straightforward.

It took one day for each site. We have two sites. We deployed each site in one day for a two day deployment total, and then our overall deployment strategy was to begin ingesting at the VM level and then start focusing on the agent-based deployments to equal an exchange.

In terms of ROI, the time of management is lower than what we were previously using so we are getting some cycles back from an engineering perspective. Also, we were able to reclaim our exchange environment in terms of resources, so there was some return there that we were able to recoup immediately, and then just the overall cost across the duration of the licensing and the hardware is expected to be lower than what we previously had.

It is on a yearly license. It actually includes the cost of the hardware, as well. So the cost of the hardware and the licensing is all rolled into a single bundle with the support.

Before going with Cohesity, we spoke with Pure, Commvault, and with Rubrik and Cohesity and Rubrik were identified as the two finalists and we did a proof of concept for both of those.

My advice to anyone considering Cohesity DataProtect is to try it out because the performance seems to exceed the competitors in the market. If it fits well in your organization or your use cases, then give it a shot.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Cohesity DataProtect a nine. I did a lot of research into the different products and found this one to be pretty much top across the board and after using it, we are very happy with the performance and the results that we are getting.

Our primary use case is for backup and DR. We have two clusters. One is all-flash. The other is a DR cluster with spinning disks. We use the all-flash to host shared storage, as well as a number of other services. We also use a number of other features such as SmartFiles. SmartFiles allows us to host all of our shared storage on the all-flash nodes, while keeping a DR ready copy on the DR cluster. This frees us from the constant management of a traditional Windows SMB environment and allows us to maximize up-time. 

The seamless backup and restore functionality has made file recovery and patch Tuesdays inconsequential. VM and SQL cloning in the test and dev feature sets allow us to immediately bring up backups both to test or for immediate availability (if needed). The VM can stand up within the Cohesity cluster and live vMotioned to our production VMware cluster. 

While other solutions might take hours to recover a VM, we can instantly bring one up and have our users back to work. The file recovery is equally simple, with the ability to clone entire SMB shares with a click.

Cohesity DataProtect is just one suite of features. Obviously, instant recovery and a live VM environment to bring up backups in would be the top feature set, however, there is so much more. 

ShareFiles allow for SMB shares to be stood up in minutes. Currently, we store our surveillance, user shares, department shares, and a number of other internal shares on SmartFiles. We even have a witness share for our SQL clustering. 

With instant DR failover using SiteContinuity, we are able to keep our files available no matter the situation.

DataProtect is a full-featured backup suite. Better support for legacy platforms would be nice, but we should be moving off those anyway. 

The marketplace app stability is still an issue at times. The company is very quick and hotfixes are released regularly. Their support is really fantastic, and I’ve only had one notable outage relating to an update. Ultimately it boiled down to a configuration error on my part, so I suppose I can’t blame them too much for that. 

Now that we have added additional nodes stability has been much better. 

I've been using the solution for two years.

With only one (self-inflicted) outage, I would say it is very stable. 

Adding nodes is trivial and can be scaled out to petabytes easily. 

I’ve had many experiences with Cohesity support. They clearly keep support a primary concern and I’ve never had a bad experience. Recently, I had to submit a P1 case, and I had two top-tier engineers on the phone within 10 minutes. 

Previously we used CommVault. We needed a more agile and robust solution. 

The setup is simple. We simply had to assign the interfaces an IP, set up our port aggregation, and create the cluster. 

We had Cohesity support come on-site to assist, however, we were there every step of the way. The Cohesity PS teams are very knowledgeable. 

Unfortunately, I am not privy to the business side of this decision, however, we've recovered from ransomware successfully without paying any ransom. Considering the organization wouldn’t exist any longer without Cohesity, I would say it was worth it. 

I would advise others to invest in their backup infrastructure. It is literally the most important solution you will purchase for business continuity. As a ransomware survivor, I cannot stress enough how valuable this solution is. 

We did evaluate other solutions and Rubrik was a major contender. Ultimately, Cohesity won out with a Cisco Hyperflex platform and superior support.